The PC Gamer Blog

Most of last week, I wrote things on the internet instead of in a magazine. We’re ramping up our efforts on the PC Gamer blog by around 5,000%, to see if people like it enough to justify developing it into something more. So with a few exceptions, my job for a while will be ‘blogger’ – a thing I have been doing for fun since 1995. This is exciting! Here’s some of the stuff we did last week:

Five good things about Supreme Commander 2 you don’t get from the demo – my attempt to explain the game’s virtues better than its own ill-chosen demo managed. I wish I’d done this for the Hitman: Blood Money demo back in the day, too.

Yeah, Mr Pink is right; the best way to make this sort of thing really get the attention it deserves is a working RSS feed. It’s pretty much how I digest all my news this day, and I just don’t have the god damned time to check the site daily. I mean, it’s not like it’s as easy as typing a few words into my address bar.

Ooh this is good! I stopped visiting the PCG site (and forums) a while back when it all seemed to be slowing to a halt. If the PCG blog is now being used for the forces of good (or evil?) then I will have to check it out more often :)

I’m going to be a dick and just say this:
If you want the PCG blog to take off I really think you need to try and get the CVG website to be less of a hideous, annoying, impossible to navigate clusterfuck.
I know there is an RSS feed (I just subcribed!) but I bet you’d get more repeat readers if they weren’t put off by the CVG website on their first read of your stuff.
Sorry to be a negative nancy, but this is a comment on the internet so I guess I could have been worse!

I’ve kind of got to agree with Wowbagger too. The CVG page design is horrid, cramming the interesting bit (i.e. the blog) into a tiny 400px-wide box surrounded by adverts and other such distracting guff on all sides. It’s an awful lot like one of those cookie-cutter local newspaper websites.

Wowbagger et al: PC Gamer is a quality mag written by the best in the business. It need to not take ten seconds to load and look like IGN.

As for PCG blogging in general: I guess it’s a slippery slope as the greatest bastion of quality print games writing – putting all your reviews online for free devalues the mag, but being a month late to the party devalues the review itself. Nice that you guys are finding the time to put some articles on there. What’s the policy on which reviews go up?

Totally agree. You were able to get the RSS for just the PCG Blog? I either get nothing or the entire CVG news feed, and quite frankly I don’t want to have to sift through tons of console news to read the few article I care about.

No need to apologise, negative nancies! This is helpful stuff for us – we want to develop the site into its own thing, and the more evidence we have that people want this, the better our chances of justifying it. Doubly useful if you make your feelings known on the blog itself.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with RPS, 1UP and Kotaku…now I have yet another quality feed to absorb my time?! Damn you PCG.

I do agree with with Jaz though that there is maybe a bit too much visual fluff around the sides of the articles. I know its probably nothing you guys can do about it personally as its probably a template the entire site has to stick to.

But may put the whole articles including pictures into the RSS summary? Then my feed reader can extract the meat and leave out the visual fluff. CVG maybe wont be so happy about that though i dont know…lost advertising revenue and such…

I was trying to figure out what everyone’s big problem with the design was. Then I realized that the link I had clicked, at the bottom of the article, was the RSS feed. I was looking at the Firefox RSS reader template! So I scrolled up and clicked the proper link and screamed and gouged my eyes out with a plastic fork.

Ha ha kidding! I knew it was the RSS feed all along. But I did click on it specifically because it was easier on the eyes than the site proper.

(Also I was wearing glasses, which do not gouge easily. They are a bit scratched now, though.)

If I may offer some suggestions…?

James’s 3-column format works because at any reasonable resolution, the main column is wider than the other two combined, giving it proper hierarchy. For an ad-supported site, though, you’re going to want to have some nice fat space set aside for shillery, so a 2-column grid is probably the way to go.

The main sin of the current site is that it has a million little boxes, each with its own background/border/color combination to set it off from the other 999,999 little boxes. So busy! Make them all match, like on James, or fall into just a couple of harmonious themes. (No more of this boxes-within-boxes-within-boxes business, either. border:none; exists for a reason.)

I am also put off by the business of segregating the content into different little boxes and arranging them vertically. Just use category slugs to differentiate previews, reviews, blogs, and features, and run them all together so the newest stuff is at the top and I don’t have to scroll around to find what I want.

Either the red or the purple has to go. Please.

In summary, mainly I am saying that James looks great! If the PC Gamer blog looked more like James, I would check in on it more. In fact, I had originally sprinkled this comment with digs at IGN’s hideous clusterfuck of a template, but then I actually visited their site to check a fact and realized it had a redesign. Then I realized the redesign could be a year or more old! It’s been that long since I’ve been brave enough to type “ign.com” into my browser. All because of a shitty design! PCG deserves better.

Agree with the other comments here – the CVG website sucks but I’ve been really enjoying the PC Gamer blog since it started being updated. Just subscribed to the RSS and added it to my James and RPS feeds.

Though to be fair, I actually have no idea if you already do this, it’d be cool to have a collection of photos of all the gaming events (E3, Blizzcon etc) or even trips to be uploaded to the blog to look through. Aside from the pictures Valve aren’t willing to talk about of course.

I’m really pleased that you started updating the blog more regularly, it’s a great way to see the PCG collective write a few paragraphs on interesting things. Almost like an extended Twitter.

And CVG does have an awful design, which is a shame as most of the content is good. I’ve grown used to it now but a move to your own sensibly designed blog would be very welcome. My eyes would be extremely thankful.

Yo! Just a quick comment. I love the idea of the blog getting ramped up, but I have to say I get slightly overwhelmed with the PCG stuff being embedded in the CVG site. I’m easily intimidated! Maybe other PCG readers are too. Who knows? They do. Obv.

I tend to read Kotaku because they get all the news up on the front page right away, so I can browse it easilly. Also most of the longer form, more thoughtful sites I read are PC only if I ever find a site with the range and depth of coverage of say, Rock Paper Shotgun, for consoles I’ll be all over it, till then any non PC news comes from Kotaku.

I thought there was a bit more attention being spent on the PCG site. And it shows and it is a good thing. Anecdotes and gaming suggestions (hilarious or serious it makes no difference) are just as vital about capturing somebodies enthusiasm for playing games as a good review.

Your ultimate goal is to get people excited about PC gaming so they come to your website to read about games they might not even be interested in, in the first place. For example I couldn’t give a monkies about football management games but Graham writes well enough to make it sound at least vaguely interesting as a game.

So, more wee stories and things like you guys are doing means more people coming to the PCG site, means more possible subscriptions means you don’t have to go back to working in a book warehouse eh?

After reading your top 5, I spotted a Steam sale on Blood Money and picked it up. (All the Hitman games, actually.) And I’m playing it thinking, “holy shit! why didn’t anyone tell me someone made a proper sequel to Deus Ex?” The only improvements I can think of would be to (a) remove the parking garage entirely from the heaven/hell level, and (b) allow me to force-feed the First Pooch a bomb so I can use it to kill the Vice President while they’re on walkies. Thanks for the rec!